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Month: August 2011

So many Americans, like myself, don’t agree with the Islamophobia that’s so rampant in our country today. We’ve been frustrated by the ineffectiveness of small efforts like blog posts, and television pundits who publicly denounce Islamophobes, to no avail.

One of the more unfortunate repercussions of the Islamophobia echo chamber is their ability to mainstream bigoted discourse towards American Muslims. As the Center for America Progress’ “Fear, Inc.” report documents, “some well-established conservative media outlets are a key part of this echo chamber, mixing coverage of alarmist threats posed by the mere existence of Muslims in America.”

This mainstreaming of hateful rhetoric gives fodder to respected community, political and civic leaders, radio talk show hosts, and Christian right preachers. Talking points that Obama is a Muslim, or that American mosques are places of stealth jihad, and other routine demonizing statements towards American Muslims have become the norm in our post 9/11 discourse on Islam in America.

But this relationship between mainstream media and the Islamophobia network is not surprising. What is more alarming is that voices of civility and sanity have not taken action to counter this reality. In an effort to push against the mainstreaming of hateful speech towards Muslims, Unity Productions Foundation has launched a new online project called “My Fellow American.” Centered on a short emotional video that juxtaposes voices of anti-Muslim hate with everyday American Muslims, it serves as a call to conscience to everyday Americans.

I love this synopsis from one of the great comments over at The Regulator:

Is anyone surprised by this?

Okay, so Palin was invited, then Christine O’Donnell. Then O’Donnell was uninvited and invited again. Now Palin has uninvited herself. O’Donnell has been uninvited. They’re trying to woo Sarah back. I think.

Update, 12:57 PM:According to NBC, Tea Party of America president Ken Crow said “I had to cancel O’Donnell,” and is trying to lure Palin back to the event.

First Sarah Palin was scheduled to attend the Tea Party of America’s Iowa rally this weekend. Then Christine O’Donnell was invited. Then Christine O’Donnell was uninvited. Then she was re-invited. Now Palin is out. Maybe.

Easy to follow, right? According to the Wall Street Journal, Palin will not share the stage with O’Donnell, who she famously endorsed in 2010, because the ex-governor is sick of “continual lying” by the event’s organizers. But there’s still confusion over what’s going on: Real Clear Politics‘ Scott Conroy disputed the report on Twitter, saying sources had told him the event was only “on hold,” while a Tea Party of America official told reporter Shushanna Walshe the event was still a go after a talk with Palin.

It’s easy to see where Palin might get a negative impression of the organizers, however. After initially asking O’Donnell to join the event, Tea Party of America’s top officials split over their reasons for rescinding O’Donnell’s initial invite, with president Ken Crow citing scheduling problems and co-founder Charles Gruschow citing widespread disdain for the former Senate candidate among Tea Party activists. They quickly brought her back into the fold, however, and Crow said they had“panicked” initially in dropping her.

Palin, who has yet to rule out a presidential bid, will still visit Iowa this weekend for other events.

Filling in on the Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday night, Tulane professor and MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry took Texas Governor and GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry to task for supporting “government so small that you don’t even notice it” on the one hand and the inconsistency of supporting the Texas sonogram law on the other.

Harris-Perry said that Gov. Perry “wants the government to be so small that it doesn’t provide a social safety net, that it doesn’t support you when you grow old and retire and need health care. That’s big government and he wants to set us free from those shackles …So, Rick Perry’s version of small government conservativism means government so small it’s not there to help you.”

“Rick Perry wants to make the government so small you don’t event notice it …unless you’re a lady. In which case, Rick Perry wants to make the government so big that it can control the pregnancy of any given woman in Texas. On nearly every other issue, Rick Perry wants government to be practically non-existent. He wants government to be nowhere near you as a citizen. Not even if you want it or need it. But on this one issue, on the issue of abortion, he wants government to be right there with you. Handing your doctor a script, whispering in your ear, that you should be ashamed of yourself. Rick Perry wants to get all up in your uterus and take a picture.”

The Texas sonogram bill requires women to get a sonogram at least 24 hours before getting an abortion. It also requires doctors to describe the fetus to the woman. Critics of the Texas sonogram law, as Raw Storyreported in March, say “the bill is really about shaming women into deciding against terminating a pregnancy.”

Key provisions of the bill, which were set to take affect on Thursday, have been blocked by a Federal judge because they violate a doctor’s First Amendment rights, among other things.

There were no injuries, and the congressman was not in his office at the time. A spokeswoman tells FOX 26 News police were called just after 11 a.m. to the 200 block of North Sam Houston Parkway East. Workers in the building originally thought they heard a car backfiring. That’s when they discovered a broken window.

Local police are investigating the incident, and are not ruling out that the shots may have been the result of a BB or pellet gun of some kind. The individual who called in the report did not state that they heard gunshots. It did not immediately appear that Green was a target.

Christine O’Donnell, back in the news this month promoting her new book, is no longer welcome at a Tea Party event with Sarah Palin this weekend.

O’Donnell was set to appear with Palin, who endorsed O’Donnell’s 2010 Senate bid, at a rally in Indianola, IA. But officials at Tea Party of America, which is hosting the event, told theWall Street Journal on Monday that they were dropping her. While the group’s president cited scheduling problems as the cause, co-founder Charles Gruschow offered a very different explanation: backlash from local Tea Party activists upset over O’Donnell’s inclusion.

“We decided not to have her speak,” Gruschow said. “We felt it was in the best interest of the movement.”

O’Donnell was a brief cause celebre for Tea Party activists in 2010, who helped her defeat heavily favored Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) in a Senate primary before she was trounced in the general election by Democrat Chris Coons. But the magic seems to have faded after her defeat as her much-hyped book has only sold about 2,000 copies.

Extreme right-wing Florida Congressman Allen West, who recently declined to run for United States senate, said in his weekly address that the Arab Spring of democratization in the Middle East and surrounding areas is really about Muslims trying to re-establish the historical caliphate:

This so-called “Arab Spring” is less about a democratic movement, than it is about the early phase of the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, the last being the Ottoman Empire.

We are witnessing secular Muslim leaders being deposed in very volatile and unstable nations. This growing Islamic Totalitarianism manifested in militant Islam has had a modus operand [sic] of capitalizing on unstable political situations (Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia).

Now we see these same types of instances occurring in Egypt, Libya, and Syria and the rose-colored glasses of some seek to portray this as a great awakening of liberty. History does not support this in the Middle East.

We must evaluate these occurrences through the prism of keen strategic and operational insight which looks out 10, 20, or 30 years.

If we had done so during the deposing of the Shah of Iran, we might have been able to prevent what arose. The Iran with which we must contend today is the major exporter of Islamic totalitarianism and state sponsored terrorism.

In the rest of the essay, he goes on to condemn Barack Obama, Palestine and the United Nations, while calling for militant support for Israel and its current borders.

The term “caliphate” refers to the historical unified Islamic government that dominated much of the Middle East and northern Africa through 1924. West and others seem to be suggesting the return of a caliphate would involve a anti-Western, anti-Israeli unified Muslim front that could threaten the United States and its allies. West’s remarks echo those of Glenn Beck who frequently warns of a coming caliphate.

West has a history of extreme rhetoric relating to Islam and the caliphate comments are far from the worst:

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry marked the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a searing monologue about what she saw as the country’s failure to learn from the disaster on Monday’s “Rachel Maddow Show.”

Harris-Perry was in New Orleans filling in for Maddow, who was on vacation. Hurricane Irene had made it impossible for her to fly to New York, but the Tulane professor called the arrangement “strangely apropos,” seeing as it was the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

She criticized the country’s lack of progress on the vulnerabilities that Katrina exposed, namely the inadequacies in public infrastructure and the racial and economic disparities that made the hurricane so devastating. She recalled, “We watched as Americans were abandoned on the rooftops of their homes, and we realized that our system could not even get water to the people of a major American city for days.”

“Whatever momentum our renewed sense of responsibility brought has been halted by this recession,” Harris-Perry said. She cited cuts to the social safety net, and opposition to environmental regulation and infrastructure as examples of the government actively working against that progress.

Harris-Perry said that while Hurricane Irene showed that people have learned to prepare for short-term disasters, the long-term lessons of Hurricane Katrina have fallen by the wayside. “Six years later, the long-term lessons about public policy, mutual investment is what we as a people are still refusing to learn,” she concluded.

Reviving his feud with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said today that the African-American retired general will vote for President Obama in 2012 because “melanin is thicker than water,” referring to the chemical that determines skin color. Powell famously crossed party lines to publicly support Obama in 2008, but said this weekend that he’s not sure if he’ll vote for the president again.